Friday, March 6, 2009...9:00 pm

Journalism set to lose 87% of its jobs – shock

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From the Twitterfeed: Someone’s crunched the numbers to find only 6,600 US journalism jobs would be left out of 44,000 if the industry went all web – as indeed many think it will.
That’s 12.9%, apparently. Or lucky 13 if you round up.
As I noted here, when Haymarket moved two of its titles to web-only, it cut the equivalent of 3.5 staff down to just one. Which, doing the math, is roughly 28% – about twice the gloomy prediction. 
Of course, the smaller the title, probably the higher the proportion of staff left, since you will tend to stick at one staffer as a minimum at first (though of course that could be squeezed down to a part-time job in time).
But I think this is a little apocalyptic – even the print-is-dead-already-you-just-haven’t-noticed Mark Potts sees a brighter upside as many redundant journalists set up on their own and explore web business models that traditional newspapers can’t handle.
Will it be the same more-or-less-secure 9-6 job they were used to? No – the chances are journalism will be even more diverse and casual than before. But that doesn’t mean the industry will die, or even shrink as much as some fear.

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